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Francois Lenoir / Reuters file
Dutch scientist Mark Post displays samples of lab-grown meat at the University of Maastricht.
The quest to grow meat in a lab rather than on an animal is due to reach its climax this fall, with the first-ever culture-dish hamburger served to a celebrity taster after a $330,000 development effort.
Mark Post, a physiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, said the project is being funded by an anonymous investor who is interested in "life-transforming technologies" and believes lab-grown meat could revolutionize the food industry.
"It's a reputable source of money, I can tell you," Post said today in Vancouver, Canada, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Post hopes the tasting will be a media event, with experimental chef Heston Blumenthal cooking the burger. The patty will be much like a regular quarter-pounder — but with one big difference: This one will be created by growing bovine stem cells in a vat, transforming them into thousands of thin layers of beef muscle cells, mincing them into tiny pieces, then combining the bits with lab-grown animal fat to form a lump of meat the size of a golf ball.
If Post and his colleagues succeed, it would mark a technological triumph after years of working to improve upon the current, millennia-old method for making meat. Researchers in the field say the livestock industry in its current incarnation is too energy-intensive and land-intensive for a global population that's rising in numbers and affluence.
Meat production already takes up more than half of the world's estimated agricultural capacity, in one way or another. U.N. figures show that animal farming takes up 30 percent of the planet's exposed land mass. And over the next 40 years, the demand for meat products is expected to double.
If the researchers' assumptions are correct, growing meat in the lab "could reduce the energy expenditure by about 40 percent," Post said. Lab-grown meat has also won the endorsement of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, because the stem cells could be extracted without killing animals.
The money behind the meat
Post has been talking about serving up the first lab-grown burger for a long time, but it took the anonymous 250,000-euro ($330,000) contribution to turn the dream into reality. Traditional meat producers weren't interested in changing their ways, and were doubtful about success, he said. "Most people don't believe it's ever going to happen," he told reporters.
When Post started working on the project, he focused on growing stem cells from pigs to create a lab-grown sausage, but he said "my financier was not very interested in sausages."
There's still a long way to go between now and the celebrity cookout: Post said he doesn't yet know what the burger would taste like, because the samples that have been grown so far are too small. The pinkish-yellowish strips of muscle cells are only about an inch (3 centimeters) long, a half-inch (1.5 centimeter) wide, and so thin (1 millimeter) that they're semi-transparent. Post feels confident that his team can perfect the process by October, but full commercialization could take another 10 years or more.
The good news is that if there's someone out there willing to buy the second lab-grown hamburger, they can get it for "an extreme reduction in price," Post told me. He estimates that piece of meat should cost just 200,000 euros ($263,000).
Beyond meat
It's worth asking whether the quest to grow lab-grown meat is worth the effort, considering that there are already vegetarian alternatives to meat. Aren't tofurky and field roast good enough? Post and others note that such products haven't made a significant dent in the meat market, and are generally more expensive than the meat items they're meant to replace.
"If there is a vegetable-derived product that can take away the human being's craving for meat, that would be preferable," Post said.
Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown says he's working on precisely that kind of stuff, and it could be on the market in the next year or so.
"We have a class of products that just totally rocks and cannot be distinguished from the animal-based product it replaces, even by hardcore foodies," he said. He promised that his plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products would be tasty, nutritious — and profitable.
"I think it's going to be one of the easier things I've done," he said.
Brown joked that he couldn't talk about the details, "because if I did, I'd have to kill you." He'd say only that he "had no trouble getting investment" from a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. To commercialize the concept, two ventures have been set up with placeholder names: Sand Hill Foods and Jasper Ridge Creamery.
The way Brown sees it, the meat industry is a "sitting duck for disruptive technology," offering a rich target for alternatives. He said the wholesale market for unprocessed meat has been estimated at $150 billion a year, which is 250 times the current market for meat alternatives.
Even though Post said the meat industry has been generally standoffish about lab alternatives, some companies are going against the grain: Nicholas Genovese, a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told journalists that JBS, one of the world's biggest meat-packing companies, was interested in his parallel effort to grow meat in the lab.
More about the future of food:
- Scientists turn stem cells into pork
- Beef producers see America losing its appetite
- The skinny on milk nutrition: Cow, goat, rice or soy?
- Future of food: Drinkable bagels and beyond
More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:
- Scientists map the world's microbes
- Device turns gestures into song
- Researchers working to build a better leaf
- Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
- Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
- Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says
Last updated 7 p.m. ET.
Alan Boyle is science editor for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding the Cosmic Log Google+ page to your circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
Lets all eat the poop burger it's the ultimate recycling program. Cost like $8 a patty but suppose to taste great. May have high sodium content so if you have high blood pressure don't eat too many or that poop could kill you. It's called the sh*t burger made in japan from real human sh*t no preservatives or additives. I think I'll take the solent green instead thankyou.
Gives new meaning to the old put down, "Eat $#!+ and die," now, doesn't it?
Im glad I will be long gone from this earth by the time this would come into full scale use. Whe dont we try feeding cattle lab created feed so that there wont be the strain on the land and we could instead it what they are currently occupying to feed to instead feed ourselves. Thats a much more acceptable scientific goal.
It seems really bad enough to eat cattle off of the feed-lot and feed-parlor operations that so many of them come from now, when I like to picture the cattle of my youth, grazing contentedly in the pasture. These disease-infested inhumane hellholes would've probably killed off twenty per cent of us by now except for everything being laced with antibiotics. Of course, this is breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogens, which may well kill of a lot of us in their own right.
The idea of cattle getting some cultured chemicals in lieu of real plants is about as repugnant to me as my consuming the cultured chemical mixture directly. What they feed cows already is plenty disturbing enough!
Yes Bill you are so right, they could grow grass in space,in hydroponics and zero gravity it could get twenty feet tall !!!!
That's it. I officially turn vegan as of now.
Oh Joy!, between the lab meat and monsanto we don't have to worry about our food! lol NOT!!
Good night nurse!! How utterly vomitable.. Next thing you know we'll all be eating genuine SANDwiches. Anybody gotta spoon? I need to gag here.
All meat is kind of gross. not only is it DEAD, it is steaming hot!
If it's not, I send it back!
Thanks, But No Thanks! Tab Soda and Cyclamates was all the Cancer Causing crap I ever needed to lose faith in How Crap is tested and then sent to Market.
Soylent Green is Next!
Watch these Movies Kiddies-Soylent Green and 1984!
Turned out that cyclamates weren't really all that bad; the study was invalidated and they are less dangerous than the saccharin that they replaced that in turn replaced them. They were relegalized in Canada. By then, though, Monsanto had developed and patented aspartame (Equal) while the chemical formulae for cyclamates were in the public domain, so you can draw your own conclusions as to what happened.
If you remember cyclamates you just dated yourself, old timer. lol
Theoretically, it should be possible to build just about anything molecule by molecule just like any old cell does, plant or animal, from food to a chair. Just pour the molecules into a programmed hopper. Any food should be able to be made from plain old dirt and compost, just like a plant does it
They've already been messing with our meat without telling us. Look at the pink glop that McDonald's has been serving us until they were outed. The work they've done with Ronald McDonald Houses is noble...but at the sacrifice to OUR health?! shame, shame, shame Soylent Green is not that far off...you will never know.
And just like with McD's, you can choose not to eat it.
At least McDonald's was real meat and not something man made to destroy us all.
So, Jen31, are you so sure of the foods you purchase, that they are as stated on the label? Look how long we have been eating McDonald's products...not knowing.
cocoa49, you need to read about the ammonia-based glop they've been using to feed the masses. I will never trust them again.
Yeah except I don't eat McDonald's...gag.
This sounds revolting.
This is making me hungry, I think I'll have a nice industrialized steak-umm with some delicious cheese whiz.
what happens if one of those burger patties develops an eye and starts winking?
LMAO
so do the meat patties need corn to get bigger?
Sounds very scary to me. What else will they use to hurt us?
You can trust industry, just don't drink the water and don't breath the air.
I wonder what, if any side effects can happen with lab grown meat. I've seen I am Legend when they tried to cure cancer. What happens when you move to lab grown meat?
Always liked the Star Trek episode "Miri, Miri" where a planet which mirrored Earth had developed a technology which almost worked to stop all aging, and it worked for everyone who hadn't gone through puberty, but killed all adults and older teens. I can just see something like this doing the same thing, since it sounds exactly like bad science fiction anyway.
This fake meat is dangerous, and it probably won't be labeled. Listen folks, and think: they start with stem cells. Isn't anybody afraid of cancer? How about allergies, because the proteins will not be the same exactly as real muscle and real fat: where are the nerve cells that usually run through muscle? Has anybody considered that there are thousands of enzymes that also are nutrients? If a person wants to be a vegetarian, then be a vegetarian (and take some B-12 and other amino acids that only occur in meat as supplements).
And for meat eaters: do not use crop land, but plains that would not grow crops anyway. Do not feed corn to animals: it creates unhealthy meat. Do not eat loads of meat every day; eat vegetarian once or twice a week for your health, and do not eat more than 1/4 lb. of meat a day. Do not feed antibiotics to farm animals; these only destroy the effectiveness of antibiotics for everybody. Use meat that is better for the land such as buffalo, which do not destroy land the way cattle do. Take care of the land so that people do not stop you from raising animals in the future. Fence, or else do not kill predators who must keep populations of deer down. Be careful about mad cow disease or any other disease. If ranchers did all these things, there would not be any problems with eating meat.
Please, food industry, do not taint our food, and honestly label it.
Like the world your way, even though it would make meat so expensive that most people wouldn't worry about overconsumption anymore. Buffalo is surprisingly good, and don't think that they routinely get antibiotics, at least not yet. Actually, grazing hillsides that are too steep for row crops but safe for deeply-rooted pasture grasses is a good, sustainbable practice as well.
Economics is probably on its way to solving both the overconsumption of meat and the overconsumption of energy.
OMG, How could anyone eat anything like this? Just thinking about it turns my stomach. It's like a bad sci-fi story...oh, wait, it already WAS a bad sci-fi story made into a mediocre sci-fi movie starring everyone's favorite rightie Charlton ("Soylent green is people") Heston, the gun toting actor.
I think I'll pass on this one. Excuse me because now I'm going to go and vomit. I can hardly believe that people actually think corn fed beef is good.
Maybe the Mayans were right and the world SHOULD end on 12/21/2012. I think I'd rather go quickly rather than bite by chemical bite of pretend meat.
Post as in aka Seventh Day Adventist's Post??
I used to enjoy a juicy cheeseburger at the drive-in restuarant with a side order of fries and a strawberry shake...I would close my eyes and savor every mouthful.........now I spend more time checking what i'm eating and making sure nothing is strange in it and I swear I taste weird crap all the time !
WHEN we used to eat at McDonald's and my son got the shake with M&Ms in it, it didn't melt right and, because of that, we never ordered it again. Wonder what THAT was made out of....shaking my head...no, never mind, don't want or need to know...the damage is already done...YUCK!
Now that the "soylent green" comments have all been played out, let's look at the loss of jobs.
No more ranchers, cowboys, butchers. No more slaughter houses, bone meal for dog food.
This will spread from beef to chicken to fish to fruit and vegetables. The implications of this are far worse than than the benefits could ever be. And the costs to mankind will be devistating.
No good can come from this, what-so-ever. The fact that they can do this sounds good for food on long interstellar voyages, where the nutrients needed to grow this product can be converted from fecal waste, and thus save space on cramped vehicles.
Bringing new meaning to the term; sh*t burgers.
Not wanting to eat gross stuff is the persuasive argument to me. All this job-loss stuff sounds like what they said about cars putting all of the buggy-whip makers out of work.
and you can name 10, or even 3 buggy whip manufacturers?
What would it cost to retrain a rancher to work in a lab to grow his beef?
This is a pretty cool project (though I really can't see this becoming so cost-effective that it'd solve the approaching global food shortages), but the fact that PETA is supporting it almost made me be against it.